Hardly a week (and definitely not a month) passes without someone in the media mentioning an article about something causing addiction to something, or some new-ish thing is addicting or otherwise harmful to the person or society. In the vast majority of cases, the addiction being discussed related to 12-24 year olds and it's something that society, as a whole, is either prudish about, uncomfortable about, or considers time wasting.
A few notable examples include:
1) addiction to video games. Probably the number 1 addiction discussed with regards to young people.
2) addiction to sex.
3) addition to pornography
4) addition to technology. TV was the original bugbear, now it's computers, the internet, or mobile phones.
It's come to the point where I've begun to ask if any of this is real. Or is it just the establishment poo-pooing the new and changing world using scary, ill-defined terminology?
While physical addiction is a very real, and very nasty thing. As you well understand if you've known anyone who's gone through withdrawl from any kind of drug (most commonly nicotine, but street and medicinal drugs are well known to have much worse side-effects), psychological addition is very hard to define effectively.
The online Medical Dictionary defines addiction as a persistent, compulsive dependence on a behavior or substance, which is a very broad definition.
To highlight the difficulty in understanding this, I can be pedantic and use some trivial examples such as eating, sleeping, drinking water, and breathing. While the suggestion that such things are addictive could be labeled as being facetiuous, it's difficult to properly assess why. After all, all of us require these things in what might be considered a compulsive dependence. I.E. I'm compelled to eat or I'll die. Yet we don't consider them addictive. However, some drug addicts reach a stage where they physically require the drug or they could die (certain drugs). So where does the difference lay?
I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. Even the professions that deal with understanding addiction are often split on their opinions. Which is precisely my quarel with the use of the word addiction. It's so ill defined that its use often appears to be more politcally motivated than through any real concern over the 'addiction'. That is, it seems a term that is used by those wishing to affect a certain order on society that best represents their own views.
To highlight this idea, consider the following addictions that exist in society, but have rarely (especially in recent times) been labelled as such:
1) Work. In North America, the Orient, and often in professional occupations anywhere in the world, work dominates lives. Why? There is no need for it. Work is intended as a way to 'do your part for society' and to make enough money to survive. So why work yourself crazy for some company. Especially when there is evidence to suggest the stresses can be detrimental to your health? There used to be term used for a work addict: workaholic. Interestingly, this seems to have fallen in to disuse in modern times.
2) Sport.
Playing. While playing sports is generally healthy, it can be taken too far. Such as when a person is injured but still undertakes the sport/exercise instead of caring for their injury.
Watching. Even worse, in my opinion, are the people addicted to watching sports. And there are MANY (yes, enough to be capitalized). It's a common and well-accepted issue around the world that many spousal arguments occured due to scheduled sports shows and their interference with other family/relationship events. Furthermore, is there any real need or purpose to memorizing random statistics of baseball players? Does society gain any benefit through intercity conflicts that arise between fans.
3) Money. Now we come to a biggie. Addiction to money is something I've never heard mention in the media, yet recently the entire world has suffered because of the extreme money-addiction of a handful of people running big corporations. IMO, addition to money more than almost all other addictions, has the chance to ruin not only your life, but the lives of you family and, potentially many others.
4) Your Children / Family. Yes, I'm moving back into the eating/breathing realm here. But let's face it, if you love your children then it's easy to be addicted to them. Which leads to...
5) Love. Yes, a great many people are addicted, to varying degrees, to love. Yet rarely has Love ever been mentioned as addiction. But look at what people will do for 'love': sacrifice their home, family, career, life. People (most commonly teens) will become depressed for lack of peer love to the point that they'll stop eating, won't sleep well, will be unable to concentrate. And when an opportunity for love arises, they'll give up almost anything for it. The earily stages of 'love' (first two years) have recently become known as the obsessive stage which, I think, summarizes the idea clearly. It also supports the idea that love is an addiction, since what is a psychological addiction but an obsession.
With all this in mind, what becomes clear when we hear the term 'addiction' used in the media, is that it is more often than not, being used in a political manner to affect social change in favour of ideals upheld by the person using it. Not because of any real concern for those who may, or may not, be 'afflicted'. So perhaps we should stop labeling behaviours we don't like as 'addictive' and just deal with the problem as they arise.
Or we could insist all the banking CEOs are stripped of their jobs (and salaries) and put in psychological institutions to deal with their money addictions.
Insight and longevity.
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